A bloody rampage shocks low-crime Japan

Overall, Japan is one of the safest places anywhere. Locals and visitors alike can feel secure walking through even the narrowest back streets of big cities like Tokyo and Osaka late at night or in the wee hours of the morning. Freakish crimes like the 1995 sarin-gas attack in the Tokyo subway that was ordered by the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult and killed a dozen people, while injuring many others, are rare. When violent crime does occur in Japan, it really shakes people up.

Police investigators examined the crime scene in Tokyo’s Akihabara district last Sunday afternoon

This past Sunday in Akihabara, a Tokyo retail district known for electronics shops whose video games and small-appliance displays sometimes spill outside onto crowded sidewalks, a young man went on a rampage, first ramming a vehicle into passersby, then getting out and stabbing more than a dozen people. Seven were killed. Tomohiro Kato, a 25-year-old resident of Shizuoka, a prefecture (an area comparable to a state or province) located to the west of Tokyo, was apprehended by the police and charged with carrying out the assaults. He told investigators “that he [had] decided to stage the attack two or three days earlier and chose the Akihabara area because he had visited it and knew ‘many people gather there.'” Kato “admitted posting messages to an online bulletin board warning of his rampage up to seven hours before arriving in [the] Akihabara district,” Japanese police investigators said. In one message, headlined “I will kill people in Akihabara,” Kato stated that he intended to smash a vehicle into a crowd; the message noted: “[W]hen I can’t use the car anymore, I will use a knife….” (CBC, Canada, with Associated Press)

Passers-by offered prayers for the victims of this past Sunday’s knifing rampage in the popular retail district

Kato’s deadly rampage has shocked Japan, “which is known for its low crime rate compared to other industrialized nations. With a population of 12.7 million, Tokyo is considered safe thanks to tight restrictions on guns.” After Sunday’s grisly event, Japanese-government officials “scrambl[ed] to respond…, holding an emergency meeting…to discuss ways to secure crowded public spaces. One idea was to limit access to large knives such as the 23-centimeter one used in the attack. ‘Obviously, the suspect possessed the knife without a legitimate reason,’ said Nobutaka Machimura, the chief cabinet secretary. ‘I think we have to seriously consider what we can do to step up the restrictions.'” Canada’s CBC news service notes that, in Japan, “[g]un violence is rare…compared to stabbings. In March, one person was stabbed to death and at least seven others injured when a man attacked passersby with two knives outside a shopping mall in Ibaraki prefecture in eastern Japan.” (CBC, Canada, with Associated Press)

Is Japan becoming a more violent place? Yomiuri Shimbun, a national, Japanese daily, reports that Sunday’s stabbings constituted “the worst case of its kind” since the World War II era “in terms of the number of deaths” that were involved; the paper notes that, according to Japan’s National Police Agency, “there were eight cases of random street assault [nationwide] last year, twice as many as in 2006. This year, there have been at least five cases…..” Among a litany of ugly crimes, the newspaper cites that of “a 16-year-old male, second-year student at a private high school,” who this past January “slashed at passersby in [a] commercial street in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, and was held for attempted murder. The youth reportedly told police: ‘I wanted to massacre people. I didn’t care who they were.'”

Tomohiro Kato, a 25-year-old temp worker who lived outside Tokyo, was apprehended by police and charged with carrying out the automobile and knife attacks

A few hours Sunday’s incident, the scene of the crimes Kato is accused of committing “had been cleared,” and there “were pools of water on the side of the road where the blood [of the stabbing victims] had been washed away…There was still a sense of shock. Foreigners were asking journalists what was going on. Japanese people were taking photographs. Some were just staring….Japanese television networks broadcast news flashes each hour throughout Sunday afternoon, updating their audiences as the tragedy unfolded.” Publicly, questioning of what motivates some people to commit violent crimes against innocent passersby has begun to emerge. Some Japanese “blame the pressure people feel [they live] under – Japanese society can be intolerant of failure, or of difference. If you do not fit in, do not get a job or do not behave like everyone else you can be ostracized. Many worry, too, about growing inequality [in Japan]. People on the margins of society see a greater gap between themselves and those [who are gainfully employed] than perhaps there was before.” (BBC)

A criminology professor at Seigakuin University in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo, “speculated…that Kato is a sociopath who blames society for his unstable life as a temporary worker.” Kato reportedly “was a good student in junior high school and advanced to a highly competitive high school….But as of [last] weekend, he was a temporary worker living in a condominium provided by his temp agency.” The criminology professor told the Japan Times: “Something must have gone wrong after graduating from high school, and he came to find the real world tough going….He probably was suicidal. Such aggression can sometimes be targeted at others. People must have paid attention to him when he was young, and he must have thought he could still gain attention by [doing something evil].” The criminology expert “said many young people are selfish and immature, and such violence is a manifestation of this” trait. He added: “When things do not go as well as they hoped, they blame the people around them….” The criminology expert also noted “that the parents of violent people [might fail] to instill in them a sense of self-control.”